Quotes About Majority Opinion

#1. Some of our problems can no more be solved correctly by majority opinion than can a problem in arithmetic and there are few problems that cannot be solved according to what is just and right without resort to popular opinion.

Henry Latham Doherty

#2. While majority opinion may not take kindly to forms of modern art, that same majority has also been hostile to most original and radical innovations, such as automobiles or airplanes or transatlantic cables or Protestantism or the theory that the earth is round and not flat.

Alfred H. Barr Jr.

#3. What was reality? An objective truth? A collective illusion? A majority opinion? The product of historical understanding? A bream?

Matt Haig

#4. The majority is by no means omniscient just because it is the majority. In fact, I've found that the line which divides majority opinion from mass hysteria is often so fine as to be virtually invisible.

J. Paul Getty

#5. Following Christ, the Church seeks the truth, which is not always the same as the majority opinion. She listens to conscience and not to power, and in this way she defends the poor and the downtrodden.

Pope John Paul II

#6. I created hoaxes. I confronted and challenged the majority opinion. I attacked, humiliated, and criticized the voice of the corporate mainstream media.

Joey Skaggs

#7. [Justice George Sutherland said, in the majority opinion for the Carter Coal case] 'One who does a thing in order to avoid a monetary penalty does not agree; he yields to compulsion precisely the same as though he did so to avoid a term in jail.

Jim Powell

#8. Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.

Vaclav Havel

#9. Truth is never determined by majority opinion, but by divine revelation.

Steve Lawson

#10. Too often an institution serves to bless the majority opinion. Today when too many move to the rhythmic beat of the status quo, whoever would be a Christian must be a nonconformist.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#11. Of course, the hustler doesn't proclaim his trade to the outside world, for typically he has neither a masochistic urge to be put down nor the reactive hostility to majority opinion that one finds in the flamboyant homosexual or "professional Negro" or "professional Jew" and the like.

Ned Polsky

#12. A majority opinion does not represent the ultimate decision because such a view is not unanimous and lacks general will.

Duop Chak Wuol

#13. However, he didn't have a high opinion of the average man's ability as a fighter. The majority of men couldn't fight at all and even most outlaws were the merest amateurs when it came to battle. Few could shoot well, and even fewer had any mind for strategy.

Larry McMurtry

#14. Every year I hear people complain that the quality of screenplays and movies is declining. In my opinion, the vast majority of scripts written - as well as most movies that are released - are not very original, well-written, or interesting. It has always been that way, and I think it always will be.

Viggo Mortensen

#15. Once upon a time supporters of the Steinitz-Tarrasch school had a very high opinion of a queen-side pawn majority. Modern strategy on the other hand categorically denies that such a majority is an independent factor of any importance.

Alexander Kotov

#16. [We are] no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.

Woodrow Wilson

#17. The French under the old monarchy held it for a maxim that the king could do no wrong . The Americans entertain the same opinion with respect to the majority ... If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#18. We like to think that all people have hidden depths, but the fact is that a lot of people are shallow.
The vast majority don't have an opinion until they tune in to AM radio or read the papers. Then they become social critics.

Jessica Zafra

#19. In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#20. Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.

Moses Finley

#21. The majority is the best way, because it is visible, and has strength to make itself obeyed. Yet it is the opinion of the least able.

Blaise Pascal

#22. The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

Bertrand Russell

#23. The bad workmen who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good.

John Stuart Mill

#24. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

John Stuart Mill

#25. Most revolutions start small and simmer under the surface gathering strength, adding to an ideology, gaining favourable opinion- first as a
credible alternative and then as the majority view

Gyan Nagpal

#26. For all serious intellectual progress depends upon a certain kind of independence of outside opinion, which cannot exist where the will of the majority is treated with that kind of religious respect which the orthodox give to the will of God.

Bertrand Russell

#27. Sense isn't democratic. A senseless opinion that's advocated by 'the majority' is still senseless.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#28. I couldn't find my cup of tea.
So probably, I've been simply taking a sip from everyone else's cup. May be it shouldn't matter as long as there is tea to drink. Or should it?

Sanhita Baruah

#29. According to recent opinion polls, a large majority of Iraqis believe that the U.S. military has no intention to leave Iraq, and that it would stay even is asked by the Iraqi government to leave.

John Conyers

#30. The young [Nazi] movement is in its nature and inner organization anti-parliamentarian; that is, it rejects ... a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the level of mere executant of other people's wills and opinion.

Adolf Hitler

#31. The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court ... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified.

William O. Douglas

#32. To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but, simply that the majority are unripe, andhave not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#33. The opinion of the majority or the minority is of no importance! The important thing is the opinion of the Truth, of the Reason, of the Logic, of the High Intelligence!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#34. My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.

Christopher Hitchens

#35. We respect opposition to any position or policy. But we believe that the opinion that should prevail and be respected is that of the majority.

King Hussein I

#36. There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.

James Madison

#37. In business, as in politics, it is never easy to go against the beliefs and attitudes held by the majority. The businessman who moves counter to the tide of prevailing opinion must expect to be obstructed, derided and damned.

J. Paul Getty

#38. Since the market tends to go in the opposite direction of what the majority of people think, I would say 95% of all these people you hear on TV shows are giving you their personal opinion. And personal opinions are almost always worthless ... facts and markets are far more reliable.

William O'Neil

#39. Public opinion doesn't exist. More precisely, it exists sometimes, concerning matters about which there's a clear majority view.

Jordan Ellenberg

#40. Heterodogmatize (v.) To have an opinion different from the one generally held. Just because you are in proud possession of opinions that differ from those of the majority of the population is no reason to start patting yourself on the back. Usually it just means you are wrong. also

Ammon Shea

#41. The majority of people who fail to accumulate money sufficient for their needs are, generally, easily influenced by the opinion of others.

Napoleon Hill

#42. In the long run the ideas of the majority, however detrimental they may be, will carry on. The future of mankind depends on the ability of the elite to influence public opinion in the right direction.

Ludwig Von Mises

#43. Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion.

Ludwig Lewisohn

#44. While it's very hard to know exactly how to measure public opinion there, because there's no really good polling, the fact of the matter is that in all the polls I've seen the vast majority of the Iraqis prefer to be free and are pleased that the coalition freed them.

Paul Bremer

#45. And that which yesterday was the novel opinion of one man, to-day becomes the general opinion of the majority.

Leo Tolstoy

#46. The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.

George Henry Lewes

#47. The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.

Soren Kierkegaard

#48. Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women's movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step.

Gloria Steinem